Tracks

Behold These Grizzled Men

Oh, those dirty and dusty sooners who claimed their land back in the late 1800s were true roughnecks, seeking a way to get west first. Their sneak tactics worked and while the state of Washington was founded differently, one would like to believe that there are some shared intricate details between the timber men, all flannel and pipes and axes and those filthy settlers who were soon to learn about gold and whatnot even further west and that brings out all kinds of demons in man - the shiny stuff. The Lonely H, a rock and roll band from Port Angeles, Washington, must have some ancestry in each of these two lots of people for they play music as the Rolling Stones would if they were forced to scrap together some quarters for a hamburger, if they were used to hunching over a measly campfire cooking some baked beans in a can.

There's a grizzly demeanor to the fuzzy sound they bring forth, opening mouths and hearing a century-old sense of survival and getting by spill forth like rapids. It's fast and it's loud and it goes for the throat where it wraps around like a muffler. The Lonely H takes us back to a time when all facial hair was becoming and charming, when a mustache demanded respect, when the musk of unshowered-brand body odor was heroic, when bell-bottomed jeans were not the exception, when a guy could get some peyote whenever it was called for and when moonshine went down the hatch like lemonade. They might sleep on a bed of cacti and have unhealthy obsessions with Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp and Ulysses S. Grant and there's a complex in some of their songs where they feel as if they were actually lonely, unable to associate with the ways around them.

This current time is course and disgusting, slobbering with text messages and the wireless revolution. The music rewinds to the places that they wish they could teleport back to and get reconnected with trappers and musket-toting dudes who could skin a fox in two minutes flat, who could laugh through their blackened teeth frighteningly and with the tar from their lungs and throat hacking up with it. This is only if they can take Mick, Ronnie, Keith and Charlie with them. They'd likely need Brian Jones as well and would put up a fit if he wasn't in that time machine.